All I want to do is scrape away the big, ugly callous on my right big toe. Soak my aching feet after a grueling 35-hour (oh, woe is me!) work week.

Ten grueling hours yesterday. Eight today. It was grueling, and I hate the fact that it was grueling. My 58-year old body is feeling every bit of its years, and that is simply not acceptable.

I come home and soak my feet. Call a friend, who needs me to be a friend, even though I don’t know how to do that. I invite that friend for my very limited and rarely available me time. Time that I used to have too much of, that I didn’t make good use of. I wait for her call back and wonder if I’ll be able to be a friend then.

First I sit on my front porch, but it is very “breezy.” (30+mph winds for a freaking month+!) So I move to my (lesser used) back porch.I am dressed in a t-shirt and capris, outside where it is warmer than inside. Inside the house I would need to wear sweats and slippers (and sometimes gloves and earmuffs. I shit you not). But, today, in the Spring of 2016 (!) on the back porch of my house in Missouri, where I am right now, in as few clothes as possible, I am absorbing the breeze and the sun and, after collecting an Adirondack chair and a table, with my phone and my first glass of wine in two weeks, I rest my body.

But my mind will not let go.

It’s a new view from my back porch, a new picture, a new landscape, a new horizon, my first time even noticing my yard in days, and I realize that my lawn has a weird mow pattern: a little here, a little there, and a little more over there. I barely have time to process the mysterious implications when I notice another (way more) interesting activity.